Danger! Books Can Change You.

Danger!
Books can change your operating system.
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moar littrary kittehs

In honor of Banned Book Week a serious LOLcat, a presentation of an invaluable set of books about banned books accompanied by a rant likening book pricing structure to a form of suppression.


Banned Books Four Volume Set Published by Facts on File
Ken Wachsberger (general editor)

Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds by Nicholas J. Karolides
Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds by Margaret Bald
Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds by Dawn B. Sova
Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds by Dawn B. Sova

These are an invaluable resource for anyone needing to research the history of book banning over the centuries.  Each book begins with an overview of its category followed by brief histories of a hundred or more books that have been suppressed somewhere at sometime--many repeatedly.

Every public and school library from middle school to college should have two sets--one for the Reference Shelves and one for checkout.  Every news organization needs at least one set for those times when attempts are being made to exclude books from curriculum or libraries. So those covering the story can have their awareness grounded in the historical context of the current hullabaloo and the facts at hand.

But unfortunately that is unlikely to happen as at $60 per book that's $240 per set.  Even the one volume version is priced at $240.  They are all hardback and use library quality binding and paper so that is almost understandable but it prices them out of range for many public school and public library districts.

There are no paperback or ebook editions that one could expect to be priced affordably for the average home reference library at any of the online booksellers and tho Infobase Publishing parent of the Facts on File imprint does show ebooks in their catalog the price is hidden until you sign in and based on their statement that they cater to educational institutions and libraries I doubt I'm even eligible to have an account with them even if I could imagine being able to pay their prices.  

In my humble opinion this amounts to a form of suppression essentially excluding those below the upper middle class and the school and library districts in their neighborhoods since they are funded by local property taxes.

I know.  That rant doesn't jive with my first statement.  Well, I made that before I found the publisher's page with the price quotes.  I stand by it.  For the essence of their value is in the impact they can have on the local and national consciousness on the issue of book banning and thus on the debates surrounding every local attempt to take a book off a public shelf or out of a curriculum.  But if over 60% of the people never encounter them that value is diminished, even nullified.

Yes.  I understand that a lot of care went into creating these books--gathering the facts and compiling them and writing the overviews for each category and the histories for each book and designing the books.  But dictionaries, almanacs, atlases, and quotation books have all managed to provide affordable editions.  It mystifies me why so many publishers can't see that more sales at lower prices would likely increase profit.

This post spun off its original axis after the first paragraph.  I fully intended this to be a several paragraph rave about these information packed reference books. I still feel as enthused as ever by the books themselves but the news about the price structure shook me up.  I believe I was harboring a bit of hope for having a set for my own reference library and that has been dashed by what I learned today.  Which soured my mood and morphed the rave into a rant.

I came close to deleting everything after the first paragraph and returning to the original intent.  But when rereading it and encountering the line comparing this price-jacking to suppression itself I realized the relevance of the rant to the Banned Book Week theme and decided to make it part of the discussion.

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Presenting a Web Wonder: The Public Domain Review |

The Public Domain Review |:

'via Blog this'

This website is a treasure trove of cultural curiosities and wonders culled from that vast and ever-growing conglomeration known as 'the public domain'--the works and the artifacts whose copyright has expired and thus are now free to view and use by any and all.

Archivists and librarians, universities and museums, the world over have been busy creating electronic archives for electronic copies of their collections of public domain items--images, texts, film, audio, sculpture etc. The Public Domain Review is a journal cum blog in which articles written by aficionados of the arcane share tantalizing tidbits about the works and their creators and the milieu in which they were born.

Does that sound dry and somber?  Well take a look at this selection of article titles:

ROBERT SOUTHEY’S DREAMS REVISITED
THE MEMOIRS OF JOSEPH GRIMALDI
PETER THE WILD BOY
STORIES OF A HOLLOW EARTH
BUGS AND BEASTS BEFORE THE LAW

CHRISTOPHER SMART’S JUBILATE AGNO

IMAGES: KITAB AL-BULHAN OR BOOK OF WONDERS
TEXTS: URIAH JEWETT AND THE SEA SERPENT OF LAKE MEMPHEMAGOG
FILMS: THE THIEF OF BAGDAD
AUDIO: THE VOICE OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
AUDIO: SANTA CLAUS PROVES THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS
IMAGES: WORLD WAR II FROM THE AIR
FILMS: THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI
TEXTS: THE ECCENTRIC MIRROR

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I'm in a Social Media Swamp

I've just joined another social media site.  Its for readers to recommend books to each other.  Its a beta and it has a lot of promise.  But I'm wondering whether I've not already got involved with too many of these.  Between goodreads, Bookdrum, facebook, twitter, ning, cheezeburger.com and the several for fiber arts, current events, entrepreneurs,  bloggers, and  and and... there are more than I can visit every day--more than I can even remember as I sit here.  And for most of them I mostly lurk.

This might not sound like a rave recommendation for Custom Reads but I did just spend an hour browsing on it and ordered two books from the library which I encountered on there for the first time and that's added to the two hours I spent on it last night.  So it is obviously something worth taking a look at and a viable player in the 'survival of the fittest' game playing out on the web.

One of the things Custom Reads has got going for it that is different from most similar sites is that recommenders get a commission off sales made when a user clicks over to one of the booksellers from their recommendation and makes a purchase.

One of the things I might change about it if I had any say would be the ability to keep a list of the titles that interest me.  The only options given are 'I want to read' which sends you to the links to the stores, 'I have already read', 'Not interested' and 'Skip for now' which takes you to the next recommendation.  

Also, and this might be related, they keep stats for the percentage of likes you've registered for certain themes and for reccomenders and yet the only apparent way to register a 'like' is to make a purchase.  Even someone with discretionary income in this economy--which I have none--is not going to buy enough books in a month to make any kind of percentage meter go up over 1% anytime soon.  I think the fact that I was sent racing over to my local library catalog tab to look for four titles in half an hour should count for something.

Still and all I'm probably going to be lurking on Custom Reads and soon will be making recommendations myself.  I was upgraded to recommender immediately after signing up but I'm not sure if that was because I'd been issued a special invite via email because of my blog or anyone signing up gets the same upgrade.

At any rate, i recommend Custom Reads as worth a look for anyone looking for the next book they'll love.

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Hanging With Cliff

Remember CliffsNotes? Yeah, those black and yellow striped pamphlets that provided study guides for school subjects and literature.

Well I stumbled on their official website while looking for an online glossary for Shakespeare. Found that and so much more. I've been hanging out on the site for hours.

Shakespeare is an integral part of my Fruit of the Spirit story world. My character, Estelle Starr, is a Shakespearean stage actress who has memorized every part of every play. She is also quite eccentric (some might say touched in the head) as she speaks only Shakespeare. I don't mean that she speaks in Elizabethan English, I mean that even off stage she speaks only lines from Shakespeare. Though she can range among the sonnets and other poems, it is mostly from the plays.

There is another character in the FOS story world who speaks only KJV Holy Bible. He was once a preacher who was excommunicated after a shocking incident for which he was innocent of all wrong doing. His name is Inny aka Innocence and he is the husband of Faye aka Faith who is the POV protagonist of the first novel in the planned series of novels. In the two stories from the novel which I posted for Friday Snippets last summer and fall, there were several scenes in which either Estelle Starr or Inny appeared but only one which included both of them.

Those two stories, though they can stand alone as longish short stories, are intended also as chapters one and three of the novel, The Substance of Things Hoped For. The story for chapter two remains unwritten largely because it is the story in which Inny and Estelle are introduced to each other and enter into dialog. Though I was delighted by the idea at the time I first conceived it, at some point I lost confidence in it and became intimidated. It didn't help that I lost all my notes about that scene in our 2001 move. But I can't blame that entirely since those notes had been sitting in my files for over six years before that.

When I first started working on these stories I had never heard of the Internet. I used concordances for the KJV Bible and Shakespeare. At the time I had access to the Shakespeare collection at SOSC (now SOU) in Ashland, Oregon. In case you don't know what a concordance is, it is a reference book in which every instance of every word in the referenced book(s) is indexed. Thus I can begin with a concept of the intent of their communication and look up the words that may or must be included and in that way find phrases, whole verses or monologues that can convey their meaning. (To see how it is worked out in scenes, you can find the stories through the FOS portal. Yikes! I've not updated that post as promised for quite awhile. I've posted snippets from other FOS novels in progress that need to be included there. The best scene to demonstrate the concept is probably the one mentioned above in which Estelle and Inny both participate: Part Seven of Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes)

It was the discovery of a searchable Complete Works of Shakespeare online in 1997 that enabled me to finish Rag Doll Babies and start collecting promising quotes for planned scenes in other chapters. But it also spoiled me for after loosing access to the Shakespeare concordance in 1987 I'd had to resort to reading the plays and collecting the promising quotes the hard way. I had finished the first story, Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities, that way but I had purposely limited myself to Macbeth for the quotes because that play reflected the theme I wanted to emphasize.

Well recently I have decided to add a new strand of scenes to Of Cats. After I had mapped out the second chapter, Strange Attractors, and discovered that it needed to alternate between NOW and THEN just as Rag Dolls did, I decided to make that the format for all of the chapters. Besides, I was unhappy that so many very significant characters did not show up until well into chapter three and adding the THEN strand to Of Cats would give the opportunity to introduce them. It seemed appropriate then that that strand of scenes should be Faye, Julia and Wilma overseeing a high school production of Macbeth in which Cassie and Fancy perform and Briana, Fancy's daughter, debuts as a toddler and Mae Bea, Fancy's mother, in charge of costumes and Inny in charge of props and lights.

In preparation for writing that addition to Of Cats, I've set out to review Macbeth which will include rereading it of course but also watching several stage productions on DVD which I have access to through the library system. (Love Your Local Libraries!) With Ashland being home to the Shakespeare Festival and SOU's serious Shakespeare collection, it behooves even the public library system to have significant Shakespeare material available.

Which is lucky for me because I have no clue how a Shakespeare play is produced. I've never seen one in person. So I've got to research all aspects of it from costumes to props to what kinds of directions and advice Faye, Wilma and Julia would likely be giving the student actors. And since one of the trademarks of the three women's relationships is a certain amount of banter that shades into bickering, I need to familiarize myself with some of the controversies regarding the proper way(s) to produce Macbeth.

Though I have acquired several library books to aid me in this, I was please to discover that the CliffsNotes on Macbeth include an essay about the historical and contemporary issues surrounding the staging of Macbeth.

Faye's story, The Substance of Things Hoped For, is the novel I targeted at the first of the year for a sustained effort to complete a draft this year. Because of the research still necessary and several plot holes in the latter half not to mention the need to resort to searchable databases of Shakespeare and KJV every time Inny and Estelle enter a scene, I am beginning to think even sustained effort won't be enough. This was the project I designated for the Sven III aka 70 Days of Sweat Challenge too but I've not added anything but notes since it began at the first of the month. Because of that, I've missed several check-ins.

The Friday before last when I posted a snippet about a teen runaway, I remembered that I had foreshadowed her appearance in Faye's story in the same scene I linked above (part seven of Rag Doll Babies). She is the shadow that faded into the woods when Cassie stopped to give Estelle a lift. This past Friday I wrote a new scene for Crystal's story, Home Is Where the Horror Is. Since the story is set in an Oceanside, California motel much like the one Ed and I lived in for a time when he was stationed at Camp Pendleton, I anticipate little need for research which makes working with the story much less complex. I am planning to write another scene for this Friday's snippet.

If I'm to continue posting snippets and participating in Sven III, I suspect I'm going to have to start ranging over the whole of the FOS story world stories again. There are many that are much less complex than Substance.

Well, another post has gotten away with me. I began this with the intent of a quickie about a neat reference resource for readers, researchers and Shakespeare lovers. I had said all I set out to say by the end of the third paragraph. That was hours and hours ago. Before midnight! and it is now 7:30 Wednesday morning!

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Book Patrol, Reading Lamps & Misc Distractions

I just discovered a truffle of a blog called Book Patrol and have been lost in it for a couple of hours. I was supposedly researching something for tonight's post and took a major detour that landed me here. When I came up for air a few minutes ago and saw the time and tried to yank my attention back to the original project but kept feeling the pull back to Book Patrol, I thought, Well why not post about it?

The proprietor of Book Patrol is Michael Lieberman. In the words of his profile:

Book Patrol is where I share my passion for book culture. Book Patrol also appears on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's website and has had posts/reviews that have appeared on Reuters.com, usatoday.com and numerous other media related websites throughout the country. I have been active in the Seattle bookselling community since 1991 and have co-owned Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers since 1992. I have served on the Board of the Friends of the Seattle Public Library and the Book Club of Washington. I currently serve on the Board of Governors of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) where I am also the president of the Pacific Northwest Chapter . I am also a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

He not only knows his stuff, he presents it in a fun, interesting, eye-catching and thought-provoking manner. The topics are as often quirky as they are contemplative or informative. He discusses book selling, libraries, reading lamps, book binding, literary giants, e-books and other digital age impacts on book dissemination, free speech, publishing, rare books...

The post I landed on off a Google Image search for reading lamps qualifies as quirky:


It's a reading lamp.

Get it?

It is a lamp for reading.

And the lamp is reading.

ROFLOL

OK, so maybe I'm too easily amused. Not to mention too easily distracted. But can I help if if some distractions are as irresistible as chocolate?

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Thursday Thirteen #30

Thirteen Free ebook sources online: 1. Google Books 2. Project Gutenberg 3. Page By Page 4. International Public Library 5. The Professor Sites: Philosophy Professor Economics Professor Politics Professor Theology Professor Sociology Professor Arts Professor These are all works in process and all but Philosophy Professor are fairly scanty in content at the moment but a look at Philosophy Professor will give you an idea of their potential. They all feature HTML formats of books in the public domain that are classics of the discipline and in conjunction there is a growing glossary of terms as well as biographies of the thinkers in the history of the discipline. 6. Classical Authors Library these online HTML format books are hyperlinked throughout to terms in the Encyclopedia of the Self which is part of a course based on Abraham H. Maslow's theory of human motivation at Mark Zimmerman's Emotional Literacy Course 7. Read Print 8. World Public Library Association 9. Online Books Page 10. The Literature Network 11. Bartleby.com Bartleby's features basic reference shelves, including dictionaries, thesaurus, quotations etc. But two of the most exciting things fetured here are a searchable Complete Works of Shakespeare and the entire 70 volume Harvard Classics shelf. One of the most exciting things I found here was the abridged version of Frazer's Golden Bough, an in depth look at world myths with a focus on common symbols and motifs. 12. Bibliomania 13. eBooks at Adelaide Previously featured on Joystory: Baen Free Library This is the only site featuring contemporary author's and their works online which I have found so far and I wish more publisher's would get on board with this philosophy. Be sure to read Eric Flint's essay about why Baen believes there is nothing contradictory about free access to books and making a profit. Manybooks.net Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. Stone Girl 2. Susan Helene Gottfried 3. Tink 4. Daria Black 5. Rhian / Crowwoman (leave your link in comments, I'll add you here!)

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It's easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!
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Baen Books Free Online Library

Baen Books has been putting up free ebooks of a selection of titles from their catalog for the last several years. The philosophy underpinning their motivation is ably explained by Eric Flint, one of their authors and the one who proposed the idea and who then received the scepter of First Librarian for his trouble. Flint's contention is that the usual result of free access to a writer's work, whether by lending between friends, promotional copies or libraries, is always more demand for the product--in this case, the writer's stories. Please go read his essay. It is impassioned and well reasoned and says exactly what I've been thinking but unable to articulate so well. This theory applies to other intellectual property as well.

I found the Baen Free Library in the course of exploring the online resources with potential to substitute for loss of library access during our current crisis here in Southern Oregon. It is one of the few places providing free electronic formatted publications whose copyrights have not reverted to the public domain. In other words whose publication originated after 1923.

I was especially excited at the discovery because so many of the Baen authors are on my husband's fav list and I was pleased to be able to email him the link in the middle of the night so it would greet him over his morning coffee after I was asleep. I didn't bother to bookmark it myself because I had, over the last three days, collected so many fiction titles available for free, I knew I was set for months if not a year or two. I mean think of it: all the titles of Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Henry James, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, James Joyce, the three Bronte sisters, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Louisa May Alcott....

I was unprepared for one aspect of my husband's enthusiasm: his hope that he would finally be able to convince me to try one of these author's he has grown to love over the last couple of decades. Then when I was grousing this evening that I needed to come up with something to write my post about today or I was going to break my streak of daily posts now ten days long, he suggested I write about the Baen Free Library. I had to go into my email account to get the link out of the email I had sent him. I was a bit desultory about it at first. Until I came across Flint's essay. By the time I had finished reading it, I knew I would be posting about it.

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